1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to systems, methods, and computer readable media that can be used for producing likely matches to a biometric query item.
2. Related Art
People have a number of unique physical attributes. For instance, fingerprints, iris patterns, and faces are all, for the most part, unique to everyone. As a result of their uniqueness, these physical attributes have been used to identify individuals for a long time.
By way of example, fingerprints have been used to identify individuals since at least the 19th century. Historically, identification of an individual would take the form of first classifying the individual's fingerprint according to a classification system (the Henry system has been quite popular for a number of years) and then matching, by hand, that fingerprint to one of a number of previously classified fingerprints. With proper classification, this system could greatly reduce the number of fingerprints to which an actual person would have to compare the target fingerprint, thereby saving time. Of course, fingerprint matching under this scheme was still difficult and time consuming.
As time progressed and technology improved, computer systems capable of performing fingerprint matching were developed. At a high level, most of these computer systems work by taking a digitized representation of the fingerprint (or frequently a set of all 10 fingerprints)—i.e., biometric data—and analyzing it according to various algorithms against a database of other fingerprints in order to identify an individual associated with that fingerprint.
With the increasing use of biometric data to identify individuals for various purposes (both governmental and non-governmental), the databases containing biometric data have become large. According to some estimates, national scale biometric databases in the United States contain over 250 million identities. In addition, there is a change in how databases are used. Where, in the past, databases were used mainly to verity identity and/or credentials, there is currently a desire to use databases to perform exhaustive identity searches, which can be much more taxing on the matching systems.
In view of the changing nature of the databases and of their use, the current systems are rapidly becoming insufficient in a number of ways. First, they are too slow. Second, they are overly centralized, which can result in incomplete information and in central failure points. Third, a number of current systems are not scalable or are only minimally so. Accordingly, there exists a need in the art for fast systems for matching biometric data that do not suffer from the same failings as the currently available systems.